If a solution fails to appear ... and yet we feel success is just around the corner, try resting for a while. ... Like the early morning frost, this intellectual refreshment withers the parasitic and nasty vegetation that smothers the good seed. Bursting forth at last is the flower of truth.

Buffon said unreservedly, "Genius is simply patience carried to the extreme." To those who asked how he achieved fame he replied: "By spending forty years of my life bent over my writing desk."

Nothing inspires more reverence and awe in me than an old man who knows how to change his mind.

Every man if he so desires becomes sculptor of his own brain.

Intellectual work is an act of creation. It is as if the mental image that is studied over a period of time were to sprout appendages like an ameba—outgrowths that extend in all directions while avoiding one obstacle after another—before interdigitating with related ideas.

It is notorious that the desire to live increases as life itself shortens.

Physical pain is easily forgotten, but a moral chagrin lasts indefinitely.